QUOTE OF THE DAY: “The claim that Suzanne Morphew had BAM in her system is not true,” said David Beller, who has been representing Barry Morphew since he took over from Denver attorney Iris Eytan last summer. Beller and his cocounsel, Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, contend that of three labs consulted, only the El Paso County Coroner’s Office, a lab they say is certified only for DUI testing, found the three substances that make up BAM in Suzanne Morphew’s femur bone. The attorneys plan to attack the credibility of the El Paso County lab. “The scientific ‘evidence’ does not hold up,” Beller said in a text."
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Despite its specialized use, investigators found that in 2020, when they believe Suzanne Morphew was injected, only one private citizen in the Salida area had BAM in his possession: Barry Morphew. In one of his many interviews with investigators, Barry Morphew acknowledged that he used BAM a month before his wife disappeared to sedate a deer in the breezeway of the family’s Colorado home. However, he was adamant that he did not use BAM to debilitate his wife. His attorneys are preparing for a forensic courtroom showdown."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY: "Morphew’s attorneys call the BAM theory “junk science” and during trial, will question the lab work. In an interview with The Sun, Morphew’s attorney, Beller, referred to a “prosecution-sided narrative of what law enforcement wants the public to believe.” He described the science developed by detectives and toxicologists as “incomplete” adding that they ignored evidence that points to Morphew’s innocence."
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STORY: "Battle over a little-known wildlife sedative at center of murder case against Barry Morphew," by Carol McKinley, special to The Colorado Sun, on March 6, 2026.
SUB-HEADING: "Prosecutors say Morphew injected his wife, Suzanne, with a restricted chemical compound only used by zoos and large wildlife vets. Morphew’s attorneys contend the case is based on junk science.'
PHOTO CAPTION: "Investigators found a plastic needle cap in the family dryer after clothes were removed. Among those clothes was a pair of shorts authorities say Barry Morphew was wearing May 9, 2020, the day before his wife was reported missing."
GIST: "Barry Morphew’s October murder trial promises to center around a highly restricted concoction of potent chemicals the autopsy revealed were discovered in his dead wife’s remains.
The premixed chemical compound, marketed as a patented product under the acronym BAM, is a regulated blend of butorphanol, azaperone and medetomidine used almost exclusively by biologists and veterinarians to sedate large animals.
According to the grand jury indictment, the El Paso County coroner’s chief toxicologist found that “all three of the individual chemicals that comprise BAM were present” in Suzanne Morphew’s bone marrow.
Suzanne Morphew died as a result of homicide “by unspecified means in the setting of butorphanol, azaperone, and medetomidine intoxication,” an autopsy found.
In other words, it remains unclear how Suzanne Morphew was killed, but the BAM found in her bones contributed to her death.
One BAM kit features 11 milliliters of the combined substance, and can be acquired only with a prescription from a professional. It is not intended to be used on humans.
Despite its specialized use, investigators found that in 2020, when they believe Suzanne Morphew was injected, only one private citizen in the Salida area had BAM in his possession: Barry Morphew.
In one of his many interviews with investigators, Barry Morphew acknowledged that he used BAM a month before his wife disappeared to sedate a deer in the breezeway of the family’s Colorado home.
However, he was adamant that he did not use BAM to debilitate his wife.
His attorneys are preparing for a forensic courtroom showdown.
“The claim that Suzanne Morphew had BAM in her system is not true,” said David Beller, who has been representing Barry Morphew since he took over from Denver attorney Iris Eytan last summer.
Beller and his cocounsel, Jane Fisher-Byrialsen, contend that of three labs consulted, only the El Paso County Coroner’s Office, a lab they say is certified only for DUI testing, found the three substances that make up BAM in Suzanne Morphew’s femur bone. The attorneys plan to attack the credibility of the El Paso County lab. “The scientific ‘evidence’ does not hold up,” Beller said in a text.
Neither the El Paso County Coroner’s Office nor NMS Labs, a private nationally accredited Pennsylvania lab which was consulted on the case, would comment on their involvement with it.
The third lab that consulted on the case, the Center for Forensic Science Research and Education, also declined comment for this article.
Mother’s Day weekend 2020
Suzanne Morphew was 49 years old when she was reported missing on Mother’s Day, May 10, 2020. Her husband told investigators that he last saw her asleep in their bed “with labored breathing” at around 5 a.m. when he left to drive from their family home outside of Salida to Broomfield. Morphew said he had to get up north to finish a landscaping job, but an employee told police the original plan was not to drive to Broomfield “until the evening hours,” according to the indictment.
Investigators interviewed Morphew multiple times in the year following Suzanne’s disappearance. To this day, he maintains he had nothing to do with her death.
He has been arrested and charged with her murder twice.
Barry Morphew was first arrested May 5, 2021, nearly a year to the day of Suzanne’s disappearance.
However, just nine days before he was to stand trial in April 2023, a judge agreed to dismiss charges against him.
Eleventh Judicial District Judge Ramsey Lama chided prosecutors for missing court deadlines and there was still no sign of Suzanne Morphew.
Rama dismissed the charges without prejudice, which means the prosecution could refile them if more evidence came to light.
In September 2023, investigators got the major development that they had been waiting for. Suzanne Morphew’s “significantly bleached” remains were found in an open field in Moffat, about 45 minutes south of the family home, according to the grand jury indictment. The indictment also stated that Suzanne Morphew’s cancer port and some of her bike clothing were found with her remains. Oddly, some of the bones of her feet were missing as well as her bicycle shoes, according to her attorneys.
Further, there were no signs of animal predation on the bones and no signs of insect activity, leading a forensic anthropologist to conclude that her remains decomposed somewhere other than where they were found.
In June 2025, a 12th Judicial District grand jury indicted Barry Morphew for his wife’s murder, and hours later, he was arrested a second time in Arizona. He was released from jail after posting a $3 million bond.
The courts monitor Morphew’s movements through a GPS device, but he walks into court on his own, often accompanied by his two adult daughters, who have stood by him since the beginning.
At his January arraignment in Alamosa where the case is being tried, the three of them showed up with their attorneys, had a private conference, and Barry Morphew officially pleaded not guilty to his wife’s murder for the second time.
What is BAM?
The three chemicals in BAM are used mostly by biologists and veterinarians to sedate large wild animals such as deer, bear and elk.
Butorphanol is a pain reliever which is used before surgeries and also in a nasal spray to help relieve migraines. Azaperone is a tranquilizer often used by veterinarians on pigs.
Medetomidine, an emerging illicit non-opioid known on the street as “rhino tranq,” is another type of animal sedative which can be deadly to humans and is often mixed with fentanyl. Because it is not an opioid, it does not respond to an overdose reversal like naloxone, according to a May 2025 Centers for Disease Control report.
The BAM compound is so highly regulated that only two entities in the southwestern region of the state, Colorado Parks and Wildlife and the National Park Service, received prescriptions for it from 2017 through 2020, according to the grand jury indictment.
However, Barry Morphew “obtained and filled several prescriptions” in 2018 in Indiana, according to court records. As a deer breeder there, he used BAM in part to sedate the animals in order to either remove their antlers for sale or to transport the deer to game reserves for controlled hunting, according to family members who were familiar with his business.
The original arrest affidavit argued Morphew injected his wife of 26 years with a BAM-loaded dart to subdue her before he killed her. Investigators say he was angry that Suzanne was planning to leave him, according to the original arrest affidavit.
The case has been moved three times in the six years since Suzanne Morphew was first reported missing. The initial hearings started in the 11th Judicial District in Chaffee County, where she lived, and was moved to nearby Fremont County in a change of venue due to intense publicity and a small jury pool.
It moved a third time to the 12th Judicial District after Mrs. Morphew’s remains were discovered in Saguache County. Twelfth Judicial District Attorney Anne Kelly, who is prosecuting the case, declined to comment for this article.
Defense argument: Junk science
Morphew’s attorneys call the BAM theory “junk science” and during trial, will question the lab work.
In an interview with The Sun, Morphew’s attorney, Beller, referred to a “prosecution-sided narrative of what law enforcement wants the public to believe.”
He described the science developed by detectives and toxicologists as “incomplete” adding that they ignored evidence that points to Morphew’s innocence.
Morphew’s original attorney, Iris Eytan, says she left criminal defense practice due to witnessing prosecutorial misconduct by the first team of prosecutors in the 11th Judicial District. “I knew that I could do the most good by working to prevent similar egregious misconduct,” she said. Eytan founded Protect Ethical Prosecutors, a nonprofit founded to change the laws regarding prosecutorial misconduct which she believes is still a problem in Colorado and the US.
She continues to support Morphew’s innocence.
Beller and Fisher-Byrialsen plan to file formal motions challenging the forensic work in the case in the next couple of months.
Questioning the validity of forensic science is not a new legal tactic for defense attorneys.
“It’s part of our job,” said criminal defense attorney Mary Claire Mulligan, who is not involved in the case. She questioned whether the prosecutors influenced findings from the El Paso County Coroner’s Office. “Any time you say to a scientist, ‘We think this happened and we want you to tell us if it did,’ you’re making an assumption and asking a scientist to prove it,” Mulligan said.
On the other hand, Eric Faddis, a former Arapahoe County felony prosecutor who is also not involved with the case, says the day Suzanne Morphew’s remains were found provided the lynchpin the prosecution had been waiting for in order to rearrest her husband for her murder. “The forensic analysis that these chemicals were reportedly found in the victim’s body is the smoking gun. It’s really what ties Barry Morphew and no other reported person to her death.”
Faddis says the presence of BAM eliminated other potential suspects.
Controls on BAM
BAM is a relatively new compound, developed by a Wyoming veterinarian named Bill Lance. The Department of Colorado Parks and Wildlife patented the compound and prescribed it for research in 2008 and used it that way until 2013, according to CPW spokesperson Travis Duncan. “At that time, CPW veterinarians started prescribing BAM to authorized biologists and wildlife officers for statewide use.”
BAM is a controlled substance strictly regulated by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Food and Drug Administration.
According to Sam Pearce, a pharmacy technician with Wedgewood Pharmacy, the company that distributes BAM, the kits are delivered in a vial and then can be poured into a dart which is then shot into the animal to put it to sleep.
Pearce said that the weight of the animal being sedated is critical in measuring how much to insert into the animal. An adult deer can weigh as much as 300 pounds. Suzanne Morphew weighed 110 pounds when she went missing.
A pharmacology expert testified before the grand jury that BAM would render a human “wholly immobile, vulnerable and unable to resist any constrictions to the recipient’s ability to breathe.”
Two Colorado Parks and Wildlife veterinarians who were familiar with BAM told investigators that a full dose of the compound could be fatal if used on a human. Lisa Wolfe, a retired vet with CPW who was interviewed in April 2021, determined that a dose of BAM would take 8 to 12 minutes for “a female of Suzanne’s size” to be fully sedated and that that she would remain immobile for two to eight hours depending on her position, according to the arrest affidavit.
Investigators who spoke on condition of anonymity said that too much time has passed to know the exact dose of BAM that was injected into Suzanne Morphew’s body, but the indictment contended that she did not die right away because “her body had begun to metabolize the drug” and that it would have “taken several minutes to take effect.”
Dr. Jeff
Besides CPW, The Colorado Sun was able to identify one other source who had a prescription for BAM around the time that Suzanne Morphew disappeared. Conifer veterinarian Dr. Jeff Young remembered ordering it for an Animal Planet program called “Dr. Jeff: Rocky Mountain Vet.” On the show, he performed surgeries on exotic wildlife like alligators, yaks and camels. He said that early on, an investigator on the Morphew case paid him a short visit and indicated that he was not a suspect. He never heard from the investigator again and forgot about it.
In a phone interview with The Sun, Young said that the opioid BAM is so highly regulated that he was required to account for every drop. “Once it was delivered to the clinic, it went under lock and key. We logged every bottle, put a number on it and the bottles had to match. You just don’t go out to CVS or Walgreens and buy this stuff.”
Young said that he rarely used BAM on his show.
Morphew’s BAM usage
Investigators interviewed Barry Morphew at length about his BAM kits, which he told them disappeared from his workbench after his wife went missing.
During several interviews he admitted that he used tranquilizers to put deer to sleep so that he could take their antlers, according to the first arrest affidavit.
“The first thing I thought of when I came and saw deer in my yard with big horns, I’m like ‘I’m gettin’ them horns,” he told FBI and Colorado Bureau of Investigation agents, according to the affidavit.
“You’re gonna find tranq darts around my property because I’ve done that,” he told an FBI special agent in March 2021, 10 months after his wife disappeared. When asked when was the last time he used a dart gun to sedate a deer, he answered that it was around the end of April 2020, according to the affidavit, weeks before Mother’s Day weekend of the same year when Suzanne Morphew was last seen alive.
However, when investigators searched the family home in the days after Suzanne Morphew vanished, they did not find a drop of BAM.
They did discover a tranquilizer rifle in the Morphews’ gun safe and packages of tranquilizer darts which included capped hypodermic needles. In the family dryer, they found one of those caps along with the pair of shorts Morphew was seen wearing on May 9, 2020.
That day records show Mrs. Morphew and her lover shared 59 messages between them, leading up to the moment investigators believe Barry Morphew murdered her. Just after 2 p.m., she messaged her lover with a selfie, which would be the last piece of evidence that showed Suzanne Morphew alive.
The jury
Rural Alamosa County will be under an intense spotlight when Morphew’s trial begins Oct. 13. The jury will be chosen from a pool of at least 10,000 Alamosa County residents.
The San Luis Valley’s 12th Judicial District is under pressure after the original prosecution team failed to prosecute Morphew.
Linda Stanley, the 11th Judicial District district attorney who led the first attempt, was disbarred in September 2024 after Colorado state regulators found that her management of the case resulted in the prosecution “running aground.” She is appealing that ruling.
On the other side, Morphew’s attorneys are tasked with saving Morphew from a lifetime in prison for a crime they insist that he did not do.
“An intelligent jury will be of utmost importance,” said Mary Claire Mulligan, the defense attorney. “You want jurors who are not going to swallow the state’s evidence hook, line and sinker.”
However, Eric Faddis, the former Arapahoe County prosecutor, pointed out that though juries may not be familiar with BAM, they should be familiar with poisoning as a murder weapon.
“It’s not an untested theory in science, like DNA or AI, which are less established,” he said.
The forensics of toxicology was first used in 18th-century England when a woman was found guilty of fatally poisoning her father with arsenic.
Morphew’s next hearing is Monday in Alamosa."
The entire story can be read at:
https://coloradosun.com/2026/03/06/barry-suzanne-morphew-murder-trial-chemical-compound-injection/
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com. Harold Levy: Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan: Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
